“I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.”

- Alan Greenspan, Former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve - 

I was negotiating with a roofer last week to have my garage roof fixed. Toward the end of this process, he outlined what I could expect from him. Best quality materials, punctuality, clean up of the work site and immediate response in the event of any problems requiring him to come back to the house.

One thing he asked that I’ve never been asked was “Can you think of anything else that would be important to you?” Clearly this guy was a well trained professional.

As he was wrapping up, he moved on to what he expected of me. Prompt payment of the balance owing on completion of the job, care of the roof, etc. But what really impressed me was his request that if he met my expectations, would I refer clients to him? I was happy to do so as I’d already found him to be friendly, easy to deal with and very professional. I also felt better because I knew what to expect from him if the job was good and that he knew doing a good job was necessary if he was to get a referral.

He’d originally been referred to me by a friend, so clearly he was likely to follow through.

It struck me that this is an unusual practice, but in fact is an entirely logical one. It sets up the request for referrals long before the request is made. It makes you feel comfortable that he has a process and that he knows what he’s doing. Every business can do this and it’ll result in greater satisfaction, more referrals and an easier sales process.

Sticking Points.  What’s keeping you from achieving the growth, business success and prosperity you deserve? 

Do you ever wonder why some businesses seem to succeed with almost no effort, while others seem to require Herculean efforts and constant attention?

I know I do!

A few years ago, I began sharing what I did to grow 5 successful businesses with a select group of people in my high end training and mentoring programs. I use the exact same principles as I teach in the program, to run consulting projects with a few select clients each year.

Some of the results have been astounding - everything from making an extra $14,000 from a single idea in my newsletter to growing a business from $2,000,000 per year in sales to more than $6,000,000 in just under 2 years. 

The ability for some business owners to create MASSIVE and FAST business growth not only made me very proud, but also very curious.

• Was there something specific causing this level of success?
• What sort of things get in the way of success?
• Why are some very ordinary people successful with seemingly simple business ideas?
• Why are some brilliant people with great business ideas unable to achieve their goals?
• What are the things that slow people down and sap their profits and cash flow?

In looking at these successes and failures, I’ve found there are several “Sticking Points” which trip up smart business owners and undermine their success.

What I now see, is that to grow a successful business, requires you to understand what these sticking points are and to put plans in place to overcome them.

The good news is that these sticking points are relatively few and most are relatively easy to deal with. A few require some diligence and focussed work, most require a bit of thinking and some change in behaviour.

On May 5th I am running a public seminar called:
“Sticking Points.  What’s Keeping You from Achieving the Profits and Business Success you Deserve?”

Register right away to attend this seminar and I’ll underwrite your attendance, so you can attend for free. register now.

Creative business builders are always looking for better ways to serve customers. They know if they don’t constantly improve, they’ll be overtaken by swifter competitors

They continually ask themselves the following questions:

1. “What do potential customers need now? What’s not working for them? What worries them about current solutions? What would they be eager to buy?”

2. “How can we make our current customers more happy? How can we make the products we sell them more useful? More valuable?”

If you want to keep growing make sure you take the time to ask yourself these questions. And do it regularly. You can’t do it if you don’t set time aside for it, but it might just be the most important time you have. Its never wasted if your answers can advance your business?

Read more tips on new clients and customers

Every market has a smaller number of ideal buyers as opposed to all buyers. Ideal buyers are:

• easier to sell,
• easier to serve,
• more profitable,
• generate more referrals, 
•  likely to become the best clients.

Focusing on the relative few prospects who will probably be high revenue generators allows you to concentrate your resources on this critical group. In practice this means investing your marketing budget in pursuing the potential customers who will generate the most revenue. Your investment per prospect is your total marketing budget divided by the number of ideal buyers.

Converting Best Buyers Into Customers

To convert best buyers into customers, you must target them consistently and ferociously. This is a five stage process in which you shift your prospect’s attitude to your favour.

1. I’ve never heard of this person.
2. Who is this person?
3.  I think I’ve heard of this person.
4. Yes! I’ve heard of this person.
5. I want to meet this person!

Remember, the best clients are the easiest and most profitable to service. They buy more, spend more, and refer more.  Ideal Customers Buy FasterIf you focus on your ideal customers’ needs, you automatically tailor your business to meet their needs.

Once you have satisfied the best buyers, you have qualified yourself in two important ways. First by following one of the four ways of growing your business (), you can sell them more. And second, by asking them for referrals you can acquire more clients like them—the best clients.The Value of Ideal Buyers

Let’s say you have 1000 prospects and a monthly marketing budget of $10,000. If you target all prospects, you can spend $10 per prospect. However, if you target the critical 10%, the ideal buyers, you can spend your $10,000 on only 100 prospects. How much more marketing can you do for $100 per prospect?

Once prospects become customers, the same considerations apply. How much better service can you provide if you focus on totally satisfying 200 ideal customers rather than simply serving 1000? Clearly it is easier and less expensive to understand and meet the needs of 200 ideal customers than to try the same thing with 1000.

Successful businesses rely on recommendations by their existing contacts, customers and clients for future business. However, most entrepreneurs don’t know how or when to ask, or what to say.

Asking for referrals is an ongoing process, an essential element of what you do to grow your business. As such it should be an integral component of all of your dealings with clients.

In your early discussions with new customers, let them know that it’s your normal practice to look for referrals from satisfied clients. They might even be in a position to make referrals at that preliminary stage of the relationship. At the very least, this will prepare them for your asking for referrals from time to time.

Ideal times to ask for referrals are on completion of different stages of work or on receipt of a compliment from a client.

What’s the best way to get referrals? Ask for them, but earn them.

Instead of asking for referrals when you need new revenues, develop referral systems that ensure you do the asking regularly.

The best referral systems involve turning your clients into voluntary sales people. Three key elements of your relationships with clients make this transformation possible.

1. In completing your initial sale to each client, you demonstrated that you could satisfy specific customers’ needs. Had you not done this, few clients would have even considered doing business with you.
2. As prospective customers, your clients liked you and your products. Remember the old saying: “If I like you I might do business with you; if I don’t I won’t.”
3. Your clients trusted you enough to buy from you and as your best clients, continue to do business with you.

Helping clients become sales people is the easiest and most effective approach to obtaining referrals. Satisfied clients are usually happy to make referrals to businesses that can also satisfy their friends and associates. In most cases, you only need to make the appropriate request and you will receive high-potential leads pre-screened by your voluntary sales people. In all likelihood, they will only make referrals that they expect will result in successful relationships between you and the people they are referring. Few people will deliberately make potentially problematic referrals, especially if the referral could jeopardize existing relationships.

Referrals from clients are also the least expensive, often obtained at no expense. And with no or very low acquisition cost, they can yield a very high lifetime value, which in turn will increase your profitability over the long term.

• 44% of sales people give up after only one call
• A further 34% give up after the second call
• Another 14% make it to the third call
• Only 12% make it to four calls

Certainly, building trusting relationships with clients makes it easier for them to buy from you. There is however, a more significant outcome of maintaining trusting relationships. As the trust continues to build, your clients will begin to see you as a trusted advisor. In fact, your goal is to ultimately become the most trusted advisor.

You will be their ‘go-to’ person whenever they think you can help them. Obviously, this continues to make it easy for your clients to do business with you, facilitating more frequent purchases and referrals. And as an added bonus, you might also benefit from referral fees earned by connecting your clients with strategic alliance partners.

Traditionally professionals like lawyers, accountants and financial advisors have willingly assumed the role of most trusted advisor. In this role, they lead, advise and serve their clients. They guide and advise clients on the best way to achieve their goals.

The concept of most trusted advisor is equally applicable to marketing.

With Strategic Nurturing, we discuss strategic nurturing as a technique to develop and enhance relationships. By strategically nurturing prospects, new customers and ongoing clients, you are in effect serving as their most trusted advisor. Obviously, if your clients are under your care and guidance, you have responsibility to look after them. In selflessly caring for your clients, you protect them from making costly mistakes and advise and support them in the pursuit of their goals.

Your back-end sales program, is an ideal opportunity to act as your clients’ most trusted advisor. It is your knowledge of your products and services that allows you to deliver value on your customers’ first purchases. This knowledge combined with your understanding of what satisfies clients enables you as most trusted advisor to anticipate their needs and offer solutions on a timely basis. In effect, your back-end program is your inventory of solutions to clients’ unmet needs that are related to their most recent purchases. And as most trusted advisor, you know what solutions are appropriate for individual clients as well as how and when to promote these solutions.

If done from the perspective of the most trusted advisor, where your sole purpose is to give clients exactly what they need (but no more or less) to succeed. It is not about pushing unwanted or unnecessary services on unsuspecting clients. It’s about finding ways to improve your client’s business or personal condition.

We have been given two ears and but a single mouth, in order that we may hear more and talk less.” —Zeno of Citium

The most important aspect of marketing, and communication in general, is the act of listening. Without the ability to listen, that is to receive, process, understand and act on information, we can’t create marketing that works, nor truly assist our clients with their needs.

Though listening is the most important and the largest component when creating marketing, the problem is that we as small business owners often lack good listening skills, so we don’t end-up listening well to our clients, nor presenting marketing materials that are truly understood by our clients and potential clients.

Marketing is not a one-way process of creating a message and simply delivering it. You can increase the effectiveness of your marketing by listening more closely to what your clients are asking for and presenting it to them so that they understand what you are offering.

Marketing means understanding your clients by listening to them fully and completely. Great listeners are made, not born – and great listening skills can be learned.

Active Listening

The following is a guide to Active Listening. Fully understanding and communicating with others involves a lot of effort. It’s about making connections. But it becomes second nature as you fully understand the goals and returns of Active Listening.

Supportive, effective, reciprocating communication—Active Listening—focuses not only on the verbal aspect of communication, but on the nonverbal as well. Non-verbal communication can make-up the bulk of what we take in while listening, but we need to learn to focus on these conscious, unconscious and even subconscious elements of communication.

Learning to quiet one’s own thoughts and to avoid prejudging others is a first step.

After we do that, Active Listening can be understood as not just listening but clarifying and understanding another’s thoughts and feelings. To listen actively involves several steps: you need to stop, look, listen, question, paraphrase content and paraphrase feelings:

Step 1—Stop…

Stop what you are doing; eliminate distractions; focus on the person speaking. Without fully committing to the communication at this preliminary step you cannot fully and actively listen to the speaker.

Step 2—Tune-in…

Tune-in to the nonverbal cues that the speaker is communicating. This will help you understand how the person is feeling. Most communication of emotion comes through these cues.

For instance, look at the speaker’s face; the face is a window to the speaker’s feelings. Tune-in to his voice: is it trembling? Is it confident? Don’t forget body language: body language and gestures can highlight a speaker’s feelings. Are her arms crossed? Is she leaning to support herself? Is she leaning forward to make an emphatic point?

Step 3—Listen…

Listen for what the speaker is telling you, and not only what is overtly stated. Though the speaker may not say exactly how he feels, look for clues. Match verbal with nonverbal cues to decipher both the content and the emotion of the speaker’s message. Try to interpret the message according to the sender’s code system, rather than yours.

Step 4—Ask questions back…

As you try to understand the speaker, you will need to ask questions. Your questions will fit one of four categories:

• to obtain additional information (“When will your part of the project be ready?”)
• to find out how someone feels (“What are your feelings around what the VP said?”) 
•  to ask for clarification (“When you say that this project is beyond you, do you mean that you haven’t received proper guidance?”) and
•  to verify your conclusion about your partner’s meaning or feeling (“Are you saying that you can’t complete the project without additional staff resources?”)

Step 5—Paraphrase content…

Paraphrasing is restating in your own words what you think another person is saying, and could be included in the Ask questions bullet above. Paraphrasing is not repeating back everything that the speaker has said—you can repeat something exactly without understanding what it means. Instead briefly summarize the speaker’s message to that point:

Step 6—Paraphrase feelings…

Follow-up your paraphrasing of the content of the message with a question such as “You’re probably feeling pretty frustrated right now aren’t you?”. Such a paraphrase will allow the speaker to either agree with the assessment or clarify how she’s feeling. The speaker may respond, “NO, I’m not frustrated. I’m just disappointed that the job’s not working out”.

When you have completed these steps you can say that you have a fully completed portrait of your speaker’s message. You can truly say that you have listened.

Erosion is the natural process by which material is worn away from the earth’s surface. Regardless of size and nature, all businesses are subject to their own form of erosion. It’s attrition, the process whereby once active clients stop purchasing and become inactive clients. And like continuous erosion, continuous attrition reduces the overall size of the business. Three main factors contribute to why your clients stop buying from you:

1. They got out of the habit of buying from you…

Like you, your clients are busy people. They have many things happening in their lives. And in busy lives, events happen that interrupt regular or habitual behaviour. People die, businesses and other organizations cease operations, change management or move.

Lots of things happen that disrupt our normal practices. We’ve all experienced it. Perhaps you missed your usual Friday night dinners at the neighbourhood café because you were out of town and started doing other things on Friday nights when you returned. Or maybe because of a change in your work schedule, you stopped going to the gym at your regular time.

Think about a regular routine that you stopped doing because you got too busy or distracted. You probably didn’t stop because you were dissatisfied with the routine; the more likely explanation is that something else broke the link. Despite the best of intentions to return to the normal routine, you never quite get around to it. The same thing happens with clients: something happens that breaks the link and they stop buying from you. And despite the best of their intentions, they never quite get around to buying from you again. It’s attrition, it happens.

2. They had a bad experience buying from you…

Dissatisfied clients frequently vote with their feet. If they’ve had a bad experience in dealing with you, instead of telling you about the problem, they simply stop buying from you. Once again, think of yourself as someone’s client. As a purchaser of goods and services, you have no doubt had a bad experience with a business or supplier? How did you handle your dissatisfaction? Did you discuss the problem with a view to resolving it? Or did you arbitrarily decide not to deal with that business again? For whatever reason, your clients may have handled their dissatisfaction with you by choosing not to buy from you again.

3. You abandoned your clients…

When you fail to strategically nurture your prospects, new customers and existing clients, you are in effect abandoning them. When you abandon your clients, you allow others to reap the benefits of your work.

The negative effects of erosion can be reversed through erosion control tactics such as retaining walls and tree-planting. Similarly, the negative effects of attrition can be reversed.

Let’s assume that the owners of your neighbourhood café have noticed your absence. To encourage you to resume your Friday night dinners, they sent you a note telling you that they missed you and to welcome you back, offered free appetizers on your next visit. Or, on noting your prolonged absence, the manager of the gym phones to see how you are doing. How would you feel about these responses? Would they increase the likelihood of your resuming your previously normal routine?

Similarly, what do you think would have happened if you had the opportunity to discuss and resolve the issue that displeased you so much that you stopped buying from a specific business? Had you and the owner been able to resolve your unhappiness in a mutually satisfactory manner, would you have resumed buying from her?

If you are strategically nurturing your clients, how can any client possibly feel abandoned and even consider not continuing to buy from you?

strong>The best strategy to deal with client attrition is to prevent it from occurring.

The following three obstacles interfere with establishing and maintaining the client connection. Not only can these obstacles prevent the initial connection from being made, they can also unravel connections that have been established.

Obstacle 1—Conflicting Interests…

Business owners and customers have different goals. In addition to great service, customers want the best deal and practical advice. This simply means receiving good value at a reasonable price. What is relevant and helpful advice? Listen to what your clients are saying, watch what they are doing and respond accordingly. Draw on your knowledge and experience to offer relevant and helpful advice to your clients as a value-added service. You as a business owner want different things: loyal clients, more profit, positive image in the marketplace, and reduced selling cost.

Obstacle 2—Misalignment of What Business and Customers Want…

As a business owner, you are responsible for making the first move. The obvious starting point is to identify what individual customers want. Then do whatever it takes to satisfy them. Once you have connected with customers, you provide them with everything they want: useful advice, great service, fair price and the best deal. This will encourage them to come back to you and continue to buy from you.

Obstacle 3—The Reality-Perception Conflict…

Inside Reality:

As the name suggests, the inside reality describes what your business is really all about. It is everything that you are and that you do to deliver value to your clients. It is also everything that makes your business competitive. This includes all of your resources, whether tangible or intangible, or recorded as assets on your balance sheet or not.

Assessing our own businesses accurately can be very difficult. This is especially true if we have conceived and built them from scratch. Just as it is not easy to be objective about our offspring, it is difficult to be unbiased about our businesses. Owners face two major risks in assessing their businesses.

1. They may think their businesses are better than they really are. This happens when owners fall in love with their products. So focused on what they sell, they sometimes forget to pay attention to clients. To succeed over the long term, businesses must constantly focus on satisfying clients.

2. Their businesses may be better than they think they are. False modesty leads many people to underestimate the true value of what they do for clients. If you have satisfied clients, you must be doing something right. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Recognize what you do really well and use it to grow your business. Make sure that each element of your Inside Reality is properly supported by objective evidence.

Outside Perception: The outside perception is how prospects and clients perceive your business. It’s based on what your clients say about your business, which in turn is based on their experiences in dealing with you. Assuming that these experiences have been positive, it is also what keeps satisfied clients coming back and encourages them to recommend your business to others.

Unfortunately, most owners can only guess at what outsiders think of their businesses. The only way to find out what outsiders think is to ask them.

Another good approach to learning what your market thinks about businesses like yours is to do some Internet research. Search the Amazon.com or Chapters.ca sites for entries related to aspects of your products. The titles and contents of recently published books will give you an insight into the current topics of interest in your market. Also check out readers’ reviews and comments. They will tell you what is important to people in your market. Or check out the postings in user groups that focus on your products. If you have an email address that does not identify what your business does, post your own questions. Users may think of you as another user and offer useful insights into important issues in your marketplace.